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What ever happened to salvaging?


Wanderlust
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I remember salvaging was by far the quickest way of gathering resources. I also know it has been nerfed so that not all station wreckages have millions of units of materials, and that's fine. I've been looking for the ones that still have generators and such since armor and most blocks only drop 1-5 units when mined.

During my current playthrough I found a naonite-rich wreckage early on, and then a trinium-rich one after some searching. Then xanion ones just wouldn't turn up.  I've found dozens, but none had valuable blocks worth salvaging. In this picture you can see roughly the number of sectors I had to explore to find the trinium-rich wreckage (with over 3,000,000 trinium gained after efficiency reduction), marked with blue. Then the yellow lines show the amount of sectors I explored without finding a single xanion wreck worth my time. (None of them had more than 500,000 which would be 150,000 if I mined it which would take hours.) I feel like I'm doing something wrong here.

In the meantime, I need about a million xanion, and I'm wondering what would be another method to get it which wouldn't take me longer than a few hours?

 

Editing just to say I've found everything I've been looking for across the barrier. It seems to be the case that xanion wreckages with generators only spawn there.

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I remember salvaging was by far the quickest way of gathering resources. I also know it has been nerfed so that not all station wreckages have millions of units of materials, and that's fine. I've been looking for the ones that still have generators and such since armor and most blocks only drop 1-5 units when mined.

During my current playthrough I found a naonite-rich wreckage early on, and then a trinium-rich one after some searching. Then xanion ones just wouldn't turn up.  I've found dozens, but none had valuable blocks worth salvaging. In this picture you can see roughly the number of sectors I had to explore to find the trinium-rich wreckage (with over 3,000,000 trinium gained after efficiency reduction), marked with blue. Then the yellow lines show the amount of sectors I explored without finding a single xanion wreck worth my time. (None of them had more than 500,000 which would be 150,000 if I mined it which would take hours.) I feel like I'm doing something wrong here.

In the meantime, I need about a million xanion, and I'm wondering what would be another method to get it which wouldn't take me longer than a few hours?

 

Editing just to say I've found everything I've been looking for across the barrier. It seems to be the case that xanion wreckages with generators only spawn there.

 

Salvaging was nerfed a few patches back, it was far too effective.  And, to be honest, it is still too good (or mining is too bad).  Maybe salvage vs mining equalizes out when you have your AI controlled fleet doing the mining.  The income from mining is slower but it is steadier, easier to obtain, and less work to set up.

 

Around the core barrier, you will have lots of opportunities to salvage big wrecks.  Sometimes, it will be the wreckage of a faction war, other times, it  will be pirates or Xsotan you killed, though most pirate and xsotan ships do not have enough easily salvaged blocks to make them worthwhile.  Pirate bases, however, are particularly great for salvaging, as the pirate ships defending them are very large resource rich.  If you get lucky, the pirate base itself may be made of trinium or better, and killing it will be very lucrative both in the goods you get and the resources you salvage.

 

Possibly the best salvage opportunity is the cultists.  You get BIG blocks of ogonite and xanion from them and frequently they even have trinium-tech ships with lots of resources too.  Just don't vaporize them too badly, you'll accidentally destroy the blocks you want to salvage!  In fact, I like to turn off my main weapons and just kill them with salvage lasers.

 

Another great salvage opportunity is the random wreckage you will find.  Most of it is salvaged out already, but sometimes you find a wreck with millions of xanion or trinium.

 

Finally, the salvage yards can be good.  Most of the wrecks there have had their high-resource blocks removed (like shields, generators, engines, etc.), but in every salvage yard there will something like a half dozen wrecks that still have their full complement of generators, shields, engines, etc. attached.  To find them, zoom out, and scroll the mouse around.  You're looking for the glow of engines, and for the harder-to-spot glow that comes off of the resource rich blocks.

 

Anyway, in my current playthrough, I acquired over 2 million xanion in maybe, I donno, six hours played, though I could have aquired it much faster.  I got it mainly from two sets of cultists and a couple salvage yards.  Still looking for a core barrier pirate base in this playthrough.

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  • 1 month later...

Salvaging was nerfed a few patches back, it was far too effective.  And, to be honest, it is still too good (or mining is too bad). 

 

It shouldnt even be about whats better or worse - between mining and salvaging the goal does not have to be an equal balance of net-gain.

 

Whats way more important is that both are activities that are supposed to be fun. "Mining" is one of the ancient tropes of gamedesign that are most often just plain bland and boring because Mining in real life supposedly is - and that holds as much true to Avorion as it does to Eve online, Skyrim or almost every other game you can think of.

 

Look to Elite Dangerous and Star Citizens Ideas of mining. Ive got hopes that they will finally usher in a change of perspective of what used to be a required chore to allow the players to advance their ships or loadouts:

Even Elite's old mining-procedure, which was pretty bland, had at least some kind of shallow mechanic that had you hunt for profitable rocks and then sift through your hoppers, jettisoning less valuable ores in hopes of finding more valuable stuff before you ran out of Limpet Drones.

 

Recently they enhanced mining by adding two further ways of getting ores to drop: Surface Deposits and outright blasting the whole (huge) Asteroid in a big show of basey Explosions and Debris flying about. That isnt really much more captivating by complexity or challenge - but at least its fun to watch.

 

 

Star Citizen finally adds complexity and will supposedly reward your skills with the mechanics of mining with higher rewards: First you need to find the rocks, blast them just with the right amount of energy and suck up the valuables. A while back I read about much bigger mining behemoths working altogether differently, even: Apparently you hunt for ores in roids in a game of mix and match: Combine the right amounts of powders to create more valuable alloys of metal - think of mining as a sort of minigame inside the game.

 

 

In my opinion salvaging would be fine to remain the more lucrative way of aquiring high-value materials - but be more risky in actually extracting the sought materials from the wrecks. Either by the environment (Hostiles could still be around) or by the dangers of tormented Wrecks in itself: Reactors could be unstable, hazards could harm your scavenger-crews (Avorion is meant to implement boarding - so why not board Wrecks to hunt for modules?)

 

Mining could be less profitable, but maybe run just fine with low risks in the background. Both could work nicely side by side: Mining rigs secure the players supply of low-level metals to ensure they always have something to work with while the more advanced materials are quicker to gain from salvage.

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I'm completely on the "mining is too bad" front, because salvaging scales up with core distance, but not mining. So mining for Iron and Titanium is pretty profitable (unless you run into a giant Iron-Tita ship in the Inner Sphere) because a big iron or tita roid is worth forty wrecks, but mining for Ogonite and Avorion is an almost silly idea as two wrecks yield the same as a big roid.

This actually causes a problem as early materials become rare, which is a problem as Iron is necessary for inertial dampeners before getting to nom on Avorion...

The solution would merely to scale up roid size to core distance, which'd be really simple to implement, even as a mod. But it would be even nicer to scale the roids in the other direction once in the Iron Wastes (so huge Iron roids would wait in the corners to be used for ships near the center... and to allow repelled players at ultra-high difficulties to engineer monstrous fleets to reclaim back the Titanium Belt).

 

Salvaging is fine right now. Efficiency is only (less than?) half of mining but salvaging also cleans the system and makes it less laggy. Though there are bugs: non-tiny wreckage shouldn't disappear while ships are currently salvaging in the sector, and big (10k+) wreckage like stations should never disappear.

Avorionpulse's ideas about boarding wrecks are awesome though :). Especially if the amount of modules depends on the wreckage size, this could make WAAAGHs and Faction Wars even more profitable. I'm delighted at the idea of early game station boarding, whether the station's functioning or destroyed :D.

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